Nero’s all-consuming appetite is never satisfied and he died of boredom. Kierkegaard writes. “One is weary of eating on porcelain and eats on silver; weary of that, one eats on gold; one burns down half of Rome in order to visualize the Trojan conflagration.” The danger is that fleeing from boredom is often through boring diversions which only perpetuate boredom. Hence, seeking to “conquer” this root of all evil it is primarily a matter of calm deliberation. Kierkegaard satirically says: “The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of the population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.”
The fundamental reason is that we have lost the original experience of wonder in life and being. Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics: “For men were first led to study philosophy, as indeed they are today, by wonder. Now, he who is perplexed and wonders believes himself to be ignorant… they took to philosophy to escape ignorance…” A loss of meaning allows for meaning to appear as a question for humanity once again. It is a constant threat of death—that is, by threatening life as the highest value. Boredom can lead to an orgiastic dimension of human existence of wars and violence.
It is the wonder that there is being, that being is being, that being is in everything that appears as being something, as being this or that. That philosophical wonder should be understood as the wonder about the difference between Being and beings. Being is not beings. Being is nothing and no-thing, but is being. The central point of interpretation of philosophical wonder is the wonder about the “ontological difference.” Unless that difference is seen and acknowledged we are in forgetfulness of being as such.
Nietzsche called the “pathos of distance,” which is strange distance that separates and unites “at once” Being and beings, man and world, the human and the human. This sensation has nothing to do with sensitiveness, thus here still there is nothing that is an object of sensation, insofar as Being is not a being, but is simply being. What is distant is acutely present as an absence, it becomes a wound continuously bleeding and paining, that is why there is headache and leg ache, and also some God-ache. It is an ache that one is possessed by. It is enthusiasm. The Greek word enthousiasmos means literally inside, within the divine. As sensation of touching by being touched, enthusiasm says something of being-in-the-divine. We have to pray so that God grant us insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes. It is a voice that invokes religiosity, it is uninvited, it goes beyond an appeal to experiences we can assume all humans share, or recognize, and it is meant to instill belief yielding a very particular form of passionate utterance, call it prophecy.
In Plato, its magnetic nature wants to indicate that this insideness or withinness (the divine) is not the same as interiority, and thus the theion is not exterior to it. Indeed, the magnetic transmission proper to this sensation of a touching-being touched indicates the strange experience of an “inside” that is neither interior nor exterior, nor inside nor outside, nor immanence, and nor transcendence. In sublime enthusiasm, the pathos of distance reveals how distance is itself pathos, a feeling for the other and others. The experience of enthusiasm is the one of coming into (en) radical otherness (theos, the divine). In this sense, enthusiasm is conserved as the source for different forms of what he called “enthusiastic existence.” It can be understood as a revelation. The human existence is being-in-the-world, as a movement of self-transcendence or of self-overcoming. Enthusiasm is treated here as a way of being in itself beyond and outside itself. Being in itself outside and beyond itself formulates as “the enthusiastic being out of him/herself of the human. Enthusiasm does not mean “out of mind” but “being as an out of him/herself.” Touching-being-touched is magnetism. Mary Magdalene was so touched by Jesus when he told her “don’t touch me” (Noli me tangere). It is distance touching. We can call this “beautiful, sacred and divine sensation” transcendental sensation.